Google Patents A Celebrity Facial Recognition Database

Google puts Sarah Palin's face into a facial recognition database along with her less-notable daughter

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, who has described his company's strategy as "get[ting] right up to the creepy line and not cross[ing] it," was asked this week what would cross that line. He responded by expressing discomfort with the potential for a facial recognition database, reports the Telegraph.

In a bit of bad timing for Schmidt, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published a Google patent today for a celebrity facial recognition database. The database would pull the names of "celebrities" out of news articles, scour the Internet for photos in which they've been identified, apply recognition algorithms to their faces to build a biometric model of their face, and then search for more images based on the facial recognition technology.

When Google first launched image searching app Goggles in 2009, it could have incorporated facial recognition allowing users to search for anyone's identity after taking a photo of them, but decided it was too invasive a feature. The company has repeatedly made clear that it considers facial recognition to be too creepy. But apparently, only for the hoi polloi.

The patent for "Automatically Mining Person Models of Celebrities for Visual Search Applications" presents an awfully nice product for news services as they would no longer have to label the photos they take. And when you went to search for your favorite celebrity, you would find everything out there, not just photos they had been captioned in.

The database is already 1,000-people strong and includes Barack Obama, Britney Spears, Prince Harry, Sarah Palin, Bristol Palin, and a few fashion designers. "For a test, over 1000 names were picked from the list [of 30,000 famous people] and face images were acquired for each corresponding name," wrote the Google engineers in their patent application. Google said there were problems with a few of their samples. "For example, the model for Sarah Palin is clean, containing 78 images without mistakes, the model for her less-notable daughter Bristol Palin contains 7 images of her mother," write the engineers.

Google's technology had no problems distinguishing the faces of this famous duo

The same problem happened with fashion designers who are often included in captions of photos that they are not in, as when models, actors and actresses are wearing their designs. It did not happen (thankfully!) with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt -- though the two are often in photos together, the crawling software did not get them confused, probably because there are so many photos of them individually, wrote the Google patent seekers.

A celebrity facial recognition database may not seem incredibly troubling. We do recognize these people's faces without Google's help. When I saw Book of Mormon on Broadway Sunday night, I didn't need to whip out my smartphone and snap photos to recognize Drew Barrymore, Robin Williams, and Jimmy Fallon sitting three rows ahead of me.

But I wonder about the "creep" -- not creepiness -- when it comes to defining "celebrities." In the patent, the Google engineers define celebrities as anyone mentioned in one of more articles. Given that definition, this database will grow very, very quickly -- and possibly scare normal people even more from wanting to talk to journalists.

Notably, the initial search is still based on people's names not on their faces. The capability to search "by face" is out there, but Google doesn't want to be the company that explicitly crosses that line.